Nasser Rabbat, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic History at MIT, has long established himself as a pioneering scholar of Islamic architecture and history, in particular of the Syro-Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate (1260–1517). The work under review here offers both an insightful survey of his contributions to the field and intellectual testimony to the many reasons for its author's status. Mamluk History through Architecture is not a new monograph on Rabbat's favoured subject – architecture's contribution to current understandings of Mamluk society. Rather, it is a collection of fifteen essays, produced between 1989 and 2005 as articles in various journals and edited books, and brought together here in their original form but in a new organizational framework.

The book consists of four thematic parts: “Unpacking Mamluk sources”; “Architecture as a historical source”; “Architecture and language”; and “Architecture as cultural index”. As Rabbat explains in some detail in the preface (pp. x–xvi), these parts and the individual chapters are all variations on the double axial theme that has directed his research throughout his career: that scholars need to be very wary about “the ways by which Mamluk written historical sources represent the Mamluk elite, their culture and architecture” and that one key avenue for circumventing this discursive bias is “drawing on art and architecture … to evince manifestations and reflections of the mentalités and the ideological and cultural attitudes of the Mamluk elite” (p. xi). The combination of such critical attitudes towards written sources with the “visual documents” of art and architecture will uniquely enable, according to Rabbat, the formulation of “a better informed, more balanced and perhaps historically more complete analysis of Mamluk society and culture and the role of the Mamluks themselves in shaping that culture” (p. xii). In recent years, this novel interdisciplinary approach has certainly struck a chord in the study of Mamluk architecture. Furthering such research is one of the main reasons for bringing together these 15 essays in the collection under review.

The first part combines four essays that focus on “unpacking” the discursive attitudes of Mamluk written sources, vis-à-vis the Mamluk elite and its patronage of architecture in particular (1. The changing concept of Mamluk in the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt and Syria; 2. Representing the Mamluks in Mamluk historical writing; 3. Perception of architecture in Mamluk sources; 4. Architects and artists in Mamluk society: the perspective of the sources). The second part presents three examples of the alternative that can be offered by extant Mamluk architecture for uncovering aspects of Mamluk society (5. The Mosaics of the Qubba al-Zahiriyya in Damascus; 6. The militarisation of taste in medieval Bilad al-Sham; 7. Al-Azhar Mosque: an architectural chronicle of Cairo's history). This approach is furthered in the third part, where the semantics of textual concepts like Iwan, Qasr and Qubba are reconstructed by looking at the architectural evidence (8. Documenting buildings in the Waqf system; 9. The Iwans of the Madrasa of Sultan Hasan; 10. Qasr: an agent of monumentality in Mamluk architecture; 11. Mamluk throne halls: Qubba or Iwan). The fourth part moves this interdisciplinary perspective beyond the narrow confines of late medieval Egypt and Syria and towards the history of Islamic architecture at large (12. Writing the history of Islamic architecture in Cairo; 13. The ideological significance of the Dar al-ʿAdl in the medieval Islamic Orient; 14. ʿAjib and Gharib: artistic perception in medieval Arabic sources; 15. The formation of the neo-Mamluk style in modern Egypt). In all, Mamluk History through Architecture brilliantly demonstrates the conceptual unity in the work of Rabbat over the past two decades. It also shows how he has substantially contributed to challenging standard paradigms and to defining new epistemological frameworks that will remain for many years to come a seminal source of scholarly inspiration for a progressive understanding of monuments, culture and politics in medieval Egypt and Syria.

In this respect, however, this reviewer feels some final comments are necessary. In his preface, Rabbat explains that he has “tried to keep the chapters in their original form despite the fact that new research has appeared in the meantime that may alter some of my conclusions and despite my own views having changed in the last twenty years”. This is unfortunate for obvious reasons, and results in some methodological incoherence. One pertinent issue concerns the larger framework of the concept of the Mamluk polity. Despite his own critical approach to the written sources, Rabbat's visions remain caught up in the Khaldūnian ideal of the Mamluk elite as a “one-generation military aristocracy”, a traditional conceptualization that stresses Mamluk socio-political exceptionalism within its larger historical context and that becomes increasingly untenable in light of ongoing research (including Rabbat's own contributions to this collection on the many continuities in architectural forms and functions). Another pertinent issue concerns the ongoing debate of the “expressive intent of Mamluk architecture”. At one point, in one of the more recent essays (“Perception of architecture in Mamluk sources” (2002), 31–2), Rabbat defends a rather dismissive stance on poststructuralist grounds. In general, however, he claims no less than that monuments are “more representative of collective views, opinions and beliefs than literature because they are more apt to reflect collective sentiments and attitudes” (p. xii). It would be useful to reconsider both viewpoints, considering that in the Mamluk “cultural matrix” – the rich environment of cultural modes of expression available to different Mamluk elites for their deeply intertwined engagement with the public sphere – the discursive opportunities offered by public monuments were as much operationalized as were those offered by literature. Deciphering these rich semiotic contextualities is what the Mamluk historian and art historian can and should be focusing on, by critically applying Rabat's interdisciplinary approach to the full set of available sources.